Most of the people I've seen taken to court are those that seed - distribute - versus downloading or watching a stream. I'm not a lawyer, so do your own homework._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Iíll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

Downloading is still considered illegal, but not many people have been sued and I can't remember anybody ever facing criminal charges. Seeding is a good way to catch their attention if they're paying any.

Out of curiosity, how would one go about requiring encryption on peer connections?

that depends entirely on what torrent client you're using - check the settings/preferences

For example, the default setting in Transmission is "prefer encryption", but if I were paranoid, or uploading tonnes of movies myself, I'd set that to "require encryption"

that's not the only thing you should consider, though. I'm not much of a lawyer either, so I'll mostly focus on the technical stuff:

Ideally your ISP (or some traffic-monitoring third party) won't be able to tell what you're torrenting even if they can tell that you've got some peer to peer connections going on - whether it's a movie, or a linux distro (I torrent linix distros all the time -- for many builds its the preferred means of distribution because it has so little overhead for the progenitor), or a game mod, or some media that the artist released as a torrent (again, cheap distribution ftw), or some other large file that would commonly be shared in this way.

In order to sniff out infringers, they have a couple of options once they get access to the torrent file/magnet link (easy for things that are listed publicly, like thepiratebay)

1) download the torrent themselves and try to figure out the identities of whoever peers with them and whether they're worth targeting

low-profile torrents are safer from this than, say, downloading the latest Disney movie would be, but there are companies that monitor pretty much all 'suspicious' torrents that are easy enough for them to find

major trackers do take algorithmic action against this, and blocklists can help somewhat, but there's not much to be done, really

some people who are worried about this disable the DHT (distributed hash table), PEX (peer exchange) and LPD (local peer discovery)
but I like these features and I don't think they're really what sells the would-be file sharer out, though I do think it's pretty clear that disabling them will make certain trackers' countermeasures against this tactic more effective -- if a tracker blacklists someone you might not want to connect to them through peer exchange

I don't think it should really discourage anyone, but this is what the Copyright Alert System that I mentioned earlier actually implements -- if their alerts are triggered for whatever reason - in theory when you send a packet to MarkMonitor (disguised as an ordinary user) and they get your IP (but maybe your neighbor piggybacking off your wifi triggers the alert? or they make a mistake? it seems very failure-prone to me) , they'll run some algorithms and then maybe ask your ISP to send you a letter. If you get this letter a bunch of times and you ignore it and they keep getting alerts and sending letters they might ultimately throttle your bandwidth.

but overall the odds of this causing a particular would-be filesharer any problems are pretty low

2) They can try to check the content of the packets you're sending/receiving (easily thwarted with encryption)

3) your isp might notice that you're connecting to a particular tracker - which ultimately means very little but might make them focus more on your traffic

4) if someone really, really wants to monitor your activity they'll use deep packet inspection - which is very slow and costly, by the way, so they don't bother on a large scale.
There are ways to mostly thwart this, but they are also slow and costly (in bandwidth etc).

Ultimately no one's safe from these anti-filesharing systems -- again alluding to my previous post, fraudsters accusing people of torrenting potentially embarrassing things like copyprotected gay porn (whether they had or not) and extorting them for a sum of money carefully calculated to be equivalent to the legal fees of taking it to court? Not as uncommon of an occurrence as I would like it to be._________________butts

hey, all you people with experience with actual babies - what is a good size for a baby blanket? i am making one for a friend, and it's kind of out of my own head, so i need some suggestions on when i should stop._________________aka: neverscared!

Make it a queen size, so the baby has something to grow into. Like buying them pants two sizes too big and just cinching the belt up tight. It's just another money saving tip from me, the guy without a kid._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Iíll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

hey, all you people with experience with actual babies - what is a good size for a baby blanket? i am making one for a friend, and it's kind of out of my own head, so i need some suggestions on when i should stop.

Is it rectangle, square, triangle, circle? I've only knit circle baby blankets and they end up about 45" in diameter. Circles are neat because you can wrap the sprog like a burrito.

hey, all you people with experience with actual babies - what is a good size for a baby blanket? i am making one for a friend, and it's kind of out of my own head, so i need some suggestions on when i should stop.

My MIL is a big time quilter and made my daughter two baby quilts. I know they're both square and I want to say they're about 42". You can make them huge as Dogen suggests too because big ones are great to put on the floor for baby to play on/tummy time. I was really glad that a couple relatives made me those giant knotted blankets for that purpose._________________Eureka00: "Reminding you of your addictions" since 1982.

this should end up being square, but i'm working from the center out. (they should be able to manage a burrito wrap by putting the blanket diagonally, i would think.) i'll have to remember about the usefulness of round ones, though...that does open up some additional design possibilities.

but it sounds like i don't need to worry about it being too huge - so i guess i will keep going until i run out of yarn._________________aka: neverscared!

this should end up being square, but i'm working from the center out. (they should be able to manage a burrito wrap by putting the blanket diagonally, i would think.) i'll have to remember about the usefulness of round ones, though...that does open up some additional design possibilities.

but it sounds like i don't need to worry about it being too huge - so i guess i will keep going until i run out of yarn.

Yes, you can do the burrito wrap with a square one by putting it diagonal/like a diamond and laying baby from corner to corner._________________Eureka00: "Reminding you of your addictions" since 1982.

Well, you may turn orange, called hypercarotenemia (seriously). But you'd also develop vitamin and mineral deficiencies related to a lack of diversity. If you want to know which deficiencies specifically, I could guesstimate based on average nutritional content later. Off the top of my head, B12 would probably be low, because a lot of bacteria used in cultures eat it. If that happened you'd eventually develop weakness, fatigue, and either diarrhea or constipation._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Iíll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

Well, you may turn orange, called hypercarotenemia (seriously). But you'd also develop vitamin and mineral deficiencies related to a lack of diversity. If you want to know which deficiencies specifically, I could guesstimate based on average nutritional content later. Off the top of my head, B12 would probably be low, because a lot of bacteria used in cultures eat it. If that happened you'd eventually develop weakness, fatigue, and either diarrhea or constipation.

Carrots have stuff your gut bacteria need to produce B12 for you, and yoghurt is one of the best sources of B12 that you can get outside of eggs and meat.

Yoghurt also contains all nine 'essential' amino acids, and it seems to me that the carrots fill in a lot of the things that the human body needs that yoghurt is lacking.

and we've talked about carotenemia before -- back when I was eating several pounds of carrots a day, the palms of my hands and the pads of my feet did indeed turn orange. Of course, at that point I was eating way more carrots than the amount needed to get whatever nutritional value they have out of them.

I was mostly wondering how long it would be before ill effects would start to take place from such a diet._________________butts